...This American author - Shulamith Firestone - discerned the ... revolutionary potential in the expansion of humanity’s technological control of our nature, and sought to marry what she regarded as Marx’s hopes and the possibilities arising from liberatory feminism and technological progress. Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex should be required reading - albeit with accompanying cautions - for anyone wishing to understand the deeper currents of our relentlessly revolutionary age.
In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone sought to achieve a kind of melding of progressivism, Marxism, and scientism - a toxic combination that today is the defining feature of the ruling class who govern the orders of the West. Firestone understood that the Marxist vision of radical equality could never be achieved without first weakening and eventually undoing the existence of the natural family, which, in her view, remained as the last vestige of hierarchy and the human submission to a natural order that should and must come completely under technological control. Stressing the “flexibility of human nature,” Firestone concluded that “unless revolution uproots the basic social arrangements of the biological family…, the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.”
Firestone understood that nature was a limitation to the attainment of pure human freedom, and even human advances in the control of the external natural world – ones originally advanced in the philosophies of Descartes and Francis Bacon – were insufficient if this control did not extend to the technological control of human nature. The natural differences between the sexes was, for Firestone, the ultimate limitation on equal human liberation, and the very foundation and basis of human society heretofore – the human family – would have to be eliminated for the ends of self-expressive liberation.
Moreover, Firestone understood more broadly that the overcoming of such natural biological distinctions would require not just the remaking of existing culture, but its outright elimination. Against the views of figures such as Aristotle and Vico, who understood culture to be the working of human civilization alongside and within the boundaries of nature, Firestone believed that culture was a form of limitation and control that constrained the priority of self-expression. She approvingly quoted Friedrich Engel’s claim that “the whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and have hitherto ruled him, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real conscious Lord of Nature.” ...The dream of total revolution, wedding the materialist individualism of Locke and the anti-culture of Mill would arrive through technological revolution. In time, this revolutionary project was to be advanced not by Marxism, but capitalism, especially through the liberationist fever dreams of technology corporations....